We're Sorry

Through flashbacks, photographs, confessions and letters, we discover our narrator—as queer sex store worker, suicide survivor, isolated lover, immigrant’s daughter, deliberate alcoholic and artistic failure. She cycles through images, obsessions and memories, as she tries to glue together the unhinged parts of herself, both in the physical world and the one in her mind. She recalls Sloan, the girlfriend-who-got-away; Mischa, her heartbroken best friend and co-conspirator; and her elusive older brother whose absence continues to shape her life.
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With razor-sharp imagery, the fractured story of our narrator comes to life: A young woman at an emotional crossroads embarking on a journey to her future. Or is she falling into her past?

In New York’s City’s bars, bedrooms, and elsewhere, Jaroniec evokes the lives of queer underground angels, their deep friendships, their passions and their struggles.

Advance Praise for Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover:

“A lovely, gritty whirlwind tour of New York City’s queer woman scene, perfectly painted as I remember it. Mila’s writing is so colorful and beautifully present, dancing through an addiction memoir that is anything but preachy. Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is about being young and stupid and also too smart for your own good. It’s about the undying friendship between queer women, a much-needed addition to the young people writing about being young genre, and above all, it’s about living through this, as Courtney Love would say.”–Gaby Dunn, creator of YouTube’s Just Between Us

“In Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover, Mila Jaroniec writes with a seer’s wisdom and a poet’s touch. Emotions are evoked in language both lovely and dangerous. I love the honesty and the beauty.”–Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair
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“This is a book that wasn’t just typed, but carved into a mirror with a razor blade. An adventure of errors through a maze where the walls move and the floor does too, Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover pulses with vivid neon light; if Joan Didion and Courtney Love had to band together to save the world from itself on a Saturday night. Mila Jaroniec is part leader of a punk rock cult, part soothsayer of substance abuse, part art slick angel, all genius.”–Bud Smith, author of I’m From Electric Peak
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“Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover is a razor-sharp meditation on loneliness in sex, under capitalism, in the face of mortality, even in the arms of those we claim to love. Not literature, philosophy, alcohol, or commodities fill the hole, and Jaroniec’s triumph is that she doesn’t cop to any easy solutions. This isn’t a book for the winners of the world, but one that celebrates the Worst Of list, the losers, the ‘kindhearted satanists and drug addicts who are not sorry.’ Those who accept the world as-is with all its fucked up characters, each more gloriously doomed than the last.”–Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star